Warsaw Pact

PARIS -- While European and North American leaders raised their glasses to the end of the Cold War at Versailles last night, the countries of Eastern Europe spent much of yesterday pleading for tighter cooperation with Western countries in tackling the problems unleashed by the dissolution of the East bloc.Speaking before the 34 nations gathered at the three-day Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe -- which includes the United States, Canada and all the countries of Europe except Albania -- leaders of the Soviet Union's former satellite states worried openly about the legacy of 40 years of imposed communism.

Paris. THE TREATY on conventional-forces reduction signed yesterday in Paris is a good thing that time has already made obsolete. It is a step in the search to put European security on a new basis, but the threat to security no longer comes from the East but arises from within Europe.The treaty will bring destruction, or removal from the European theater, of some 100,000 major items of weaponry -- helicopters, tanks, etc. -- and is meant to establish conventional parity between the Warsaw Pact and NATO.

PARIS -- Leaders of the Warsaw Pact and NATO put their signatures on a landmark treaty here yesterday, slashing conventional weapons and sealing the end of Europe's post-war division into superpower blocs that once threatened to annihilate each other.The treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, signed five years to the day after President Ronald Reagan met Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev at their initial summit, will lead to the destruction of a quarter- million pieces of military hardware in bringing the states of the Warsaw Pact and North Atlantic Treaty Organization down to equal levels of weapons.

PARIS -- Thirty-four nations, including the United States, Canada and all the countries of Europe except Albania, will formally declare the Cold War dead and herald a new age of East-West relations free of superpower rivalry here tomorrow.The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe will open its historic meeting shortly after the erstwhile enemies of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization sign a landmark treaty reducing conventional forces in Europe.The accord limiting the deployment of weapons from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains will be the only legally binding document produced during the three days of high-sounding declarations, dinners, bilateral meetings and corridor consultations here.

WASHINGTON -- The Soviet Union and East European countries will have to destroy almost five times as many tanks as the Western alliance under the historic new treaty establishing parity in non-nuclear arms between the former Cold War foes, Secretary of State James A. Baker III disclosed yesterday.Independent arms control authorities here described the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, to be signed in Paris on Nov. 18, as virtually "a unilateral Soviet disarmament agreement."The only significant cuts the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies will have to make will be in tank forces, they said, while the Warsaw Pact, mainly the Soviets, will have to destroy tens of thousands of other weapons as well.

At one second after midnight on Wednesday, Germany will be unified. This will be the fifth time in only 12 decades that the nation has been redefined, and the occasion will be like none before. Bells will ring and sekt will be uncorked, but a strangely somber mood is expected.While the opening of the Berlin Wall last November and the practical economic problems associated with reunification have drained much emotion from the scene, there is another reason for a reserved response. It is history.